FOUR STARS...FOR WHAT ??

author=alterego
Amerk misspoke when he was talking about the number of reviews. It's only natural that the number of reviews will increase with the number games and the number of users joining the site. But he was dead-on about the gap between the number of games and ratings, and the presence of biased ratings affecting games for years to come. But these numbers are likely to increase too, and we'll need to address that at some point or another. It's better if we start thinking about it now.

Yeah, pretty much. Liberty nina'ed my comment with her stats, so it's good to know the amount of reviews haven't died, but it does seem that games have suddenly skyrocketed in relation to the amount of reviews.

Kentona has a lot of good ideas that may offer a reasonable compromise, and even y/n helpful reviews and being able to separate from demos, episodes, and completed games could be a good start.

An interesting side note: I just played a game (Veil of Darkness) that was literally about 10 minutes long. And somebody did a full-fledged review for it highlighting the game (and what it was lacking). So it can be done for very short games, although I can't see myself spending more time on a review than the game itself, so I just went with a brief comment.

Yeah I love this community, and the mods. Love you guys. <3

author=Rave
^So much this.

Admins' unwillingness to compromise will just lead to downfall of this site as people start leaving it.

Okay, totally not fair. Liberty may be being a bit hard-headed, but look at how much time she's spending on this thread with us and tossing these ideas around. That alone is awesomeness. There are sites that you don't even know who the admins are until they're making some kingly announcement to the peasants or banning you for a reason you didn't even know was against the rules.

As per my suggestion. You've simplified it. I recommend a comments page for non-reviews with the ability to rate, yes, but to keep this SEPARATE from reviews. In other words, two different ratings. "The critics gave this game two stars, and the user community gave it 4 1/2 stars." Why is it important to do this, Liberty keeps asking:

In the 1970s, science fantasy and science fiction films weren't very popular. The typical sci-fi movie was low budget and used scores composed of classical music by such artists as Mozart and Tchaikovsky. Well, there was this fellow named George, and he was no exception. He was writing what he considered a grand space opera. He set it to the music of Rachmaninoff and Dvorak, and figured that that would carry his space opera. What was his space opera? It was a new Flash Gordon movie that he had been dreaming. It was to be his masterpiece. Unfortunately, the owners of Flash Gordon didn't think George was particularly good writer, so George had to adjust the story a little bit, but not by much.

He began to film the movie on his own. When George's good friend, Steven learned that George intended to score his movie with Rachmaninoff and Dvorak works, he was mortified. He told George that he should talk to his musician friend, Johnny. Steven had used Johnny to compose the music for his recent movie, "Jaws". George agreed to talk to him, but didn't figure on being swayed, and then Johnny composed a brilliant score. George was obsessed with realism and developed new photography techniques.

In 1977, theaters grudgingly agreed to release George's movie. George's movie, "Star Wars" got some of the worst reviews and ratings of the year, being called "soulless", "nothing more than spare parts", and "an epic without a dream". Of the numerous reviews, only a handful had anything good to say.

So why did it succeed and become what many consider to be the greatest film of all time? Because even in 1977, long before the internet, the movie-goers had their own say. There was still word of mouth, newsletters that people could write to, clubs and organizations, and while the New York Times called it trash, legions of fans were growing.

You keep asking "why", so Lib, I ask you, "Why?" Why must everyone who wishes to voice his or her opinion write a review or remain silent? Not everyone wants to write a review, or feels confident doing so, thus does that mean their opinions should be meaningless? Not everyone wants to have to think about it and write an essay. Why? Why must it be your way or the highway? Why? Why can't there be a simpler system to appease the profanis vulgar?

Pianotm, the only counter-argument I have for that example is the fact that the members doing reviews aren't really of a higher status, or much different, than those who don't. While there ARE some committed reviewers on this site, the authors of each review tends to vary more often than not, and each approaches a game in a completely different style compared to others. So the "profanis vulgar" is really everyone.

Also, what's stopping people from posting simple comments on the game page? Reviews aren't the only way to give feedback to developers.

author=Ratty524
Pianotm, the only counter-argument I have for that example is the fact that the members doing reviews aren't really of a higher status, or much different, than those who don't. While there ARE some committed reviewers on this site, the authors of each review tends to vary more often than not, and each approaches a game in a completely different style compared to others. So the "profanis vulgar" is really everyone.

Also, what's stopping people from posting simple comments on the game page? Reviews aren't the only way to give feedback to developers.

Absolutely true, but there is a slight difference: if you're going to be forced to write a set amount of characters (and I do think it should be more than 300), then you're going be less inclined to do so when all you really want to say is, "Hey man, this shit bites!" So even a reviewer with no professional training, if he's going to take that plunge, is going to take a bit more consideration for what he writes, especially knowing that his one-line insult over and over again isn't likely to be approved. Most people under this circumstance will be at least forced to justify their point of view. Of course, if a writer is willing to devote an entire review to poisoned ink...well, that's an artform in and of itself. It's easy to insult: it's not so easy to write a string of insults and stay clever and original without deviating.

I had suggested that people could simply comment on the game page earlier on, in absolute defense of the review system, but as I read what was being written here, I realized the deficiency in that: it lacks that coveted tallying system that people in this thread seem to be looking for, and that's really what this argument is about. People don't want to have to read the reviews. They want to see the stars and maybe read one review to the gist of why the ratings are high or low.

And yes, we all really are the profanis vulgar, but only a small percentage of us are willing to take the time to sit down and organize our thoughts, standing above the rest. Finally, that brings us to the reward. The person who makes a comment and clicks the like button shouldn't be able to contribute to MS. That should be reserved for the careful reviewer who takes the time to organize his or her thoughts. But wouldn't it be nice if developers had that general expression of what their fans think without having to sift pages of comments? And as Rya has argued, wouldn't be nice of the rest of us, the player had that first impression to influence our decisions.

People are fans for a reason. If there a 1000 likes and the game has 4 stars, even with stupid hate and favoritism clicks, overall, we will still have a fair assessment of how people generally like the game.

Now, I am going into longwinded excessive speech mode again, so I'll stop here before I write a novel.

Edit: Ah, yes. How do we know they're playing the games? Where's the proof? Well, there's a solution to that, too. Don't worry about it. You might not like it or approve, but there's really nothing you can do about it, and it's a problem that will continue to exist no matter what you do. Trolls come in all walks of life and you really can't stop them. Their impact tends to be minor. When their impact becomes major, there is usually some impetus behind it. Requiring downloads to accompany such flags, while as you said, isn't proof either, will still likely cut down on such a problem. Proof. It's an unenforceable. Unenforceable problems, as painful as this suggestion may seem, must be ignored. If you think about it, even reviews don't provide proof the game has been played, since you can get everything you need to trick a person into thinking you know what you're talking about off of the gamepage. Easy. Just write a review that doesn't care about mechanics.

author=RyaReisender
I'd probably do it so that:
1. Person needs to be logged in to vote.
2. Person needs to have pressed on a "download" button on the game page at least once or else he will get the message "You need to play the game before rating it".

I was going to counter argue that a person may have dl'ed the game on another site and may not want to dl it again. And then there is the fact that some games use off site hosts for their dl rather than through RMN. However, I'm taking a step back to say if RMN were to develop this, then

1. It should be reasonable to expect a person will download it again from here just to vote on it, even if they already have it. They can always delete the extra copy. But, by making the download a requirement from here, this could generate more traffic for RMN because this will encourage people to come here more often to download the game.

2. It should be reasonable to expect the developer will host their game here and not offsite, if they are expecting to receive a considerable amount of votes. By hosting the game here, it encourages more people to download from RMN versus going offsite, thus making point 1 more effective in generating traffic, and it will help RMN maintain their stats.

An interesting idea I just had:

What if there was a sort of popularity ranking. Please, allow me to finish. The ranking would be kept invisible to avoid spam and trolls, and it would in no way effect the game's score.

So we don't change the review process and we keep the scoring based on reviews that have been approved (like we do now), however, the popularity of the game is determined based on traffic to the game's page.

Basically, anytime the main page gets a hit could be one popularity point, and any action on that page (subscribing, downloading, reviewing, commenting, etc) could be another point.

Then allow the viewers and players the ability to sort by popularity and reversed popularity. Again, the amount of popularity a game has won't be shown, and a popular game could still wind up with a low score, or an unpopular game with a high score.

What this does is:

1. It allows the player to see what's popular or not, and also helps to drive the popularity of a game they like by subscribing, commenting, downloading, or reviewing.

2. It gives new players a chance to see the score of the most popular and unpopular games and decide if it fits, and if they find it doesn't fit, it may encourage them to do a review of their own to balance out the score.

3. To avoid trolling and constantly refreshing a game page to boost popularity, maybe make it so a game can only get 1 popularity point per day per user just for visiting the page, but there is no limit to the amount of popularity points give per action. It's much easier to see when somebody is trolling with comments to boost popularity than just visiting a game. Also, if a review is denied, the game won't get that popularity point for the review until is approved.

4. Even an extra bonus is to allow popularity points to be subtracted if, for example, a comment is reported as spam.

Previously featured games could probably actually be filtered out of the buzz lists, since they've already had their time in the sun.

What's to stop someone from downloading over and over again and voting x times?

Simple: Each account can only vote once.

author=amerk
An interesting idea I just had:

What if there was a sort of popularity ranking. Please, allow me to finish. The ranking would be kept invisible to avoid spam and trolls, and it would in no way effect the game's score.

So we don't change the review process and we keep the scoring based on reviews that have been approved (like we do now), however, the popularity of the game is determined based on traffic to the game's page.

Basically, anytime the main page gets a hit could be one popularity point, and any action on that page (subscribing, downloading, reviewing, commenting, etc) could be another point.

Then allow the viewers and players the ability to sort by popularity and reversed popularity. Again, the amount of popularity a game has won't be shown, and a popular game could still wind up with a low score, or an unpopular game with a high score.

What this does is:

1. It allows the player to see what's popular or not, and also helps to drive the popularity of a game they like by subscribing, commenting, downloading, or reviewing.

2. It gives new players a chance to see the score of the most popular and unpopular games and decide if it fits, and if they find it doesn't fit, it may encourage them to do a review of their own to balance out the score.

3. To avoid trolling and constantly refreshing a game page to boost popularity, maybe make it so a game can only get 1 popularity point per day per user just for visiting the page, but there is no limit to the amount of popularity points give per action. It's much easier to see when somebody is trolling with comments to boost popularity than just visiting a game. Also, if a review is denied, the game won't get that popularity point for the review until is approved.

4. Even an extra bonus is to allow popularity points to be subtracted if, for example, a comment is reported as spam.

author=Liberty
We do have something like that with Buzzing games - they show up on the front page if they receive enough attention (comments, downloads, page visits) during a certain time and it degrades over time so that other games can get on the page (unless it's Pom... well, Pom has over a million views and is still gaining more every day, so...).
It's not kept, as such, but it does allow a game to be featured on the front page (of course, we discourage gaming the system by warnings and removal of buzz score to 0 - after a certain few people were trying to do the dastardly - but then it's easy to catch that kinda stuff than button pressing ;p ).

I'm not actually opposed to that idea, though I don't really see a reason for it bar 'this is popular'. Hell, I could probably guess the top games on the list pretty easily (Pom, Heroes Realm, and the other games that already top the stats lists in the monthly round-up - which are basically the same games).

That said, limiting it to only interactions from the public - not anyone who is tagged as dev, lead dev or helper, could keep it fair-ish, though that doesn't get rid of people commenting once a day forever onwards just to bump it up.

Hm... but the question is why would it be needed? Do people really care about what is popular bar trends that come and go? That is, because the same games are on top of the list all the time there'd be no real reason since those games were the obviously popular ones and ones everyone knows already (and are most likely already on the Featured list if no-where else).

At least with buzzing there's a degrade so only those games that are popular within a set amount of time jump to the top. There's even a sort by buzz option already, too.

What would be neat is a recommend feature. Say it links to your personal account page and you choose a handful of games to recommend for others checking out your profile to play. We've actually talked about doing more with profiles in the past. Hm...

You guys just described exactly how the Buzz system (that I devised) works, except I did it better because the various ways to generate Buzz are weighted by the value of the action (view, comment, download, media, review), and the weighted values were based on my statistical research into the database. And it ignores actions taken by devs on their own page. And I have also made a place in the admin console where I can edit a game's buzz manually if I needed to.

I am so far ahead of you guys that you think I am behind.